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State Lines: ‘Madonna Del Parto,’ a poem by Forrest Gander

David RoderickDecember 10, 2018Updated: December 11, 2018, 12:14 pm

Forrest Gander Photo: Ashwini Bhat

“Be With,” Forrest Gander’s new book, dwells on the recent death of his wife, C.D. Wright, who was an influential poet in her own right. “Madonna Del Parto” gauges the depth of that sudden loss. The first sentence, beginning with “And,” suggests a kind of interruption. And the thundering nature of the waterfall ruptures Gander’s consciousness almost violently, braiding terror with beauty and holiness. How does this experience intersect with Piero della Francesca’s great Madonna del Parto fresco in Monterchi, Italy? In the painting, the pregnant Madonna appears in a striking blue dress. Gander depicts Wright’s maternal and creative powers elsewhere in the book, so perhaps the connection is purely imagined or private.

Madonna Del Parto

And then smelling it,
feeling it before
the sound even reaches
him, he kneels at
cliff’s edge and for the
first time, turns his
head toward the now
visible falls that
gush over a quarter
mile of uplifted sheet-
granite across the valley
and he pauses,
lowering his eyes
for a moment, unable
to withstand the
tranquility — vast, unencumbered,
terrifying, and primal. That
naked river
enthroned upon
the massif altar,
bowed cypresses
congregating on both
sides of sun-gleaming rock, a rip
in the fabric of the ongoing
forest from which rises —
as he tries to stand, tottering, half-
paralyzed — a shifting
rainbow volatilized by
ceaseless explosion.